ON THE 2014 T S ELIOT PRIZE SHORTLIST

In this new book Petit returns to Paris and begins to obsessively revisit the zoo, the Fauverie, and remembers her father, a violent and unpredictable man, who she visited when he was on his deathbed in Paris some years ago.

The zoo animals become totemic, emblems of this traumatic relationship. The poems are unusually raw and unashamedly confessional. They are immersed in visceral details: in the blood, fur, claws, teeth, horns, hides, of the animals she sees, and how they echo the decay she observes in her father's body and spirit as he dies.

The beauty of the natural world is also cathartic and reclaims this book from being a purely dark vision.